Shortly after dawn on the warm, sunny morning of July 20, 1944, Colonel
Count Klaus Schenk von Stauf-fenberg, Chief of Staff of the Replacement
Army, drove out past the bombed-out buildings of Berlin to the airport
at Rangsdorf.
In his bulging briefcase were papers concerning new divisions for
Hitler's crumbling armies. He had been commanded to report on them to
the Fuehrer at 1:00 P.M. at Supreme Headquarters in East Prussia.
In between the papers, wrapped in a shirt, was a time bomb.
Stauffenberg was confident that it would blast Adolf Hitler to pieces.
In Berlin a small number of army officers stood by. As soon as the Nazi
warlord was dead, they intended to seize the capital, declare the Nazi
regime overthrown and sue for peace.
Chief among these officers were Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, one
of Hitler's top field commanders, and General Ludwig Beck, a former
chief of the General Staff. The generals and their accomplices knew
that the war was lost. By eliminating Hitler in one bold stroke they
hoped to get a peace that would leave the German nation with some
chance for survival.
For more than a year following the German disasters at Stalingrad and
in North Africa the war had gone from bad to worse for the Nazi
dictator. His stupendous conquests of the first war years were being
rapidly lost.
By the summer of 1944 half of Italy was gone, and most of Russia. Six
weeks before Colonel Stauf-fenberg set out on his fateful errand to
assassinate Hitler, General Dwight D. Eisenhower's Anglo-American
armies had landed on the beaches of Normandy. They were now threatening
to break out toward Paris and drive the Germans out of France.
Berlin itself, like most of the other great cities of Germany, was in
shambles from the Anglo-American bombing. The United States Air Force
bombed by day and the Royal Air Force by night, allowing no respite to
the dazed and weary inhabitants trudging about the smoking ruins. The
Germans were being repaid a hundred times for the bombings they had
initiated: of Warsaw and Rotterdam and London and Coventry.
The once vaunted German-Italian Axis, which had struck such terror
throughout Europe, lay in ruins. Benito Mussolini, Hitler's Italian
partner in crime, had been overthrown. Summoned by the King of Italy to
the royal palace in Rome on the evening of July 25, 1943, the Italian
dictator had been arrested and taken off to the police station in an
ambulance.
Adolf Hitler could scarcely help seeing the handwriting on the wall.
After Mussolini's fall would it not be his turn next? Not, he
concluded, if he could help it. He acted—for one of the last times of
the war —with ice-cold determination to restore his position and that
of Mussolini. He ordered German troops in Italy to take over.
Drive into Rome [he commanded] and arrest the whole Italian government!
Get the King and the whole bunch right
away! Arrest the Crown Prince and the whole gang! Pack them into a
plane and off with diem!
Some of the generals asked what was to be done with the Vatican, the
world center of the Roman Catholic Church, which was situated in the
heart of Rome.
Ill go right into the Vatican [Hitler answered]. Do you think the
Vatican embarrasses me? Well take that over right away. The entire
diplomatic corps are in there. That rabble! We'll get that bunch of
swine out of there! Later we can make apologies!
Hitler's ruthless determination succeeded—for the moment. On September
8, 1943, the day Italy surrendered to the Western Allies, German forces
disarmed the Italian troops with scarcely a shot and occupied most of
Italy. They halted the Allied drive up the Italian peninsula.
That was not all. By a daring air-borne operation Hitler succeeded in
rescuing Mussolini. German glider troops landed on a mountaintop where
the Italian dictator was being held prisoner by the new Italian
government. They quickly freed him and flew him off to Germany.
Hitler's resolute action in Italy helped to restore his position and
prestige. Elsewhere, though, his fortunes continued to decline. No
amount of energy and will power could restore them. By midsummer, 1944,
not only were the Russians approaching the German frontier from the
East, but the German generals knew it was only a question of a few
weeks before the Anglo-American armies under Eisenhower would be
arriving at the German border from the West. To save the Fatherland
from utter destruction some of the generals—but by no means all—decided
that the time had come to get rid of Hitler.
Actually, a handful of army officers had made a number of attempts to
kill their supreme warlord the year before—during 1943. Once on March
13 they had almost succeeded. On that day General Hen-ning von
Tresckow, Chief of Staff of Army Group Center on the Russian front,
contrived to plant a time bomb in Hitler's airplane just before it took
off following a visit of the Fuehrer to the General's headquarters. But
the mechanism failed and the bomb did not explode. A revolt in Berlin
which was timed by the generals to begin on receipt of the news of
Hitler's death in a "plane accident" had to be hastily called off.
The plot was not abandoned. By midsummer of 1944 the anti-Nazi
conspirators were again ready to strike. They realized that this might
be their last chance. Time was running out.
On July 15, Field Marshal Rommel, who now commanded the main German
armies trying to stem General Eisenhower's invasion forces in the West,
wrote Hitler: "The unequal struggle is nearing its end." He demanded
that the warlord end the war "without delay."
Said Rommel to one of his generals that day: "I have given Hitler his
last chance. If he does not take it, we will act."
Colonel von Stauffenberg, who was carrying in his bulging briefcase the
bomb to loll Hitler, belonged to one of Germany's most illustrious
military families. A gifted staff officer, he was also a poet and
musician. Now thirty-seven years old, he had been strikingly handsome
until his staff car hit an American land mine in Tunisia the year
before. In the explosion Stauffenberg lost his left eye, his right hand
and two fingers of the other hand.
These mutilations made it difficult for him to handle the bomb he was
confidently carrying. He had trained himself to set it off by using a
pair of sugar
tongs which he manipulated with the three fingers of his left hand.
The bomb, of English make, was identical to the one which General von
Tresckow had planted in the Fuehrer's airplane the year before. The
ingenious weapon had no clock mechanism whose ticking could give it
away. It emitted no sound at all when it was set off.
It worked as follows: First, a glass capsule was broken. The corrosive
acid in the capsule then ate away a small wire. This released the
firing pin against the percussion cap and the bomb went off.
The thickness of the wire governed the time required to set off the
explosion. On this morning of July 20, 1944, Stauffenberg had fitted
his bomb with the thinnest possible wire. When he broke the capsule
with his tongs the wire would dissolve in ten minutes.
The bomb would then explode. And that, the Colonel was sure, would be
the end of Adolf Hitler.
Stauffenberg arrived by plane at Supreme Headquarters at Rastenburg in
East Prussia shortly before noon on July 20, 1944. After conferring
with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Supreme Command, he
excused himself for a moment. In an anteroom he hastily opened his
briefcase and with his tongs broke the capsule of the bomb.
The time was 12:32 P.M. In ten minutes there would be—if all went
well—an explosion.
Hitler's midday military conference with his generals had already begun
when Stauffenberg, accompanied by Keitel, arrived in the map room of
the small wooden conference hall. The warlord was seated at the center
of one side of a long table around which some two dozen officers stood.
Stauffenberg took his place a few feet to one side of the Fuehrer. He
placed his briefcase under the table against the inner side of a stout
oaken support. It lay about six feet from Hitler's legs.
Hitler greeted the one-eyed, one-armed colonel curtly. He said he would
hear his report as soon as one of the generals had finished his account
of the situation on the Russian front. As the general resumed his
report, Stauffenberg whispered to a Colonel Brandt, who was standing
next to him, that he had to make an important telephone call. He
slipped out of the room.
And now unwittingly Brandt made a fateful gesture. Finding that
Stauffenberg's briefcase blocked
his feet when he leaned over the table to study the map, he bent down
and removed it to the far side of the heavy table support. This heavy
slab of oak now stood between the bomb and Hitler. Brandt's innocent
gesture saved Hitler's life. It cost Brandt his own.
Time was now ticking away, though there was no telltale sound from the
briefcase.
Keitel, to his immense annoyance, had noticed the young colonel
slipping out. He wondered why. Finally he tiptoed out of the room to
see. There was no trace of Stauffenberg. The telephone operator said
the one-armed colonel with a patch over one eye had hurriedly left the
building. Puzzled, Keitel returned to the map room. The general who was
reporting on the Russian front was nearing the end of his account.
Stauffenberg was due to report next on troop replacements. Keitel felt
embarrassed by his unexplainable absence. But not for long.
At precisely 12:42 P.M. the bomb went off.
Stauffenberg, standing at a vantage point two hundred yards away,
watched Hitler's conference hall go up with a roar of smoke and flame.
It was as if, he said later, it had been directly hit by a 155 mm,
shell. Bodies came hurtling out of the windows.
Debris flew into the air.
There was not the slightest doubt in Stauffenberg's mind that every
single person in the conference room was dead or dying. He bolted for
the camp exits, bluffed his way past the guards, drove hastily to the
nearby airport, climbed into his plane and was soon speeding back to
Berlin. Having killed Hitler, as he thought, he must now lead the
military revolt in Berlin.
But Stauffenberg had not succeeded in killing Hitler. The Fuehrer was
badly shaken but not severely injured. The oaken table support had
saved his life. His hair was singed, his legs were burned, his right
arm was bruised and temporarily paralyzed. His eardrums had been
punctured by the force of the explosion and his back lacerated by a
falling beam. But he was very much alive.
He was so much alive, in fact, that less than four hours later he was
able to receive Mussolini, who had been invited to visit headquarters
on this day of all days. Hitler showed his old fascist comrade through
the still smouldering debris where his life had almost been snuffed out.
I was standing here by this table [Hitler pointed]. The bomb went off
just in front of my feet.
The Fuehrer then drew a very typical conclusion.
It is obvious that nothing is going to happen to me. Undoubtedly it is
my fate to continue on my way and bring my task to completion. . . .
In the excitement that followed the explosion, it was perhaps difficult
for Hitler to remember how badly the war was going against him. But his
mind was clear enough by teatime to provoke him into one of the most
tumultuous rages of his life. By this hour —about 5:00
P.M.—communications with Berlin had been restored and the warlord
learned that a military revolt had broken out in the capital and that
there was another one among his generals in Paris.
Someone during tea recalled the alleged Roehm "plot" of June 30, 1934,
which Hitler had suppressed so bloodily. Mention of this ignited the
dictator like a match put to a firecracker. Eyewitnesses say he leaped
from his chair, foam on his lips, and screamed and raged. What he had
done to Roehm and his "treasonable followers" was nothing, he shouted,
to what he would do to the traitors of this day. He would destroy them
all, he cried. "I'll put their wives and children into concentration
camps and show them no mercy!"
His revenge was made easier by the failure of the generals* revolt in
both Berlin and Paris. Though it had been long and carefully prepared
by some of the best military minds in the army, the revolt was
unbelievably bungled. Stauffenberg, on his return to Berlin three hours
after setting off the bomb, made heroic efforts to take over the
capital and proclaim the Nazi regime dissolved. But the news that
Hitler was still alive made most of the generals hesitate. By midnight
the revolt had died down. Late that evening Stauffenberg himself was
lined up against a wall of the War Ministry and shot by a firing squad.
At 1:00 A.M. on July 2,1, Hitler's somewhat hoarse and shaky voice
burst upon the summer night's air in a nationwide broadcast from
Supreme Headquarters. He told the German people that he wanted them to
hear his voice so that they would know that "a crime unparalleled in
German history" had failed.
A very small clique of ambitious, irresponsible, senseless and stupid
officers concocted a plot to eliminate me. . . . The bomb planted by
Colonel Count von Stauffenberg exploded two yards to the right of me.
It seriously wounded a number of my true and loyal collaborators, one
of whom has died. I myself am entirely unhurt, aside from some very
minor scratches, bruises and burns. I regard this as a confirmation of
the task imposed on me by Providence.
Hitler ended by promising that he "would settle accounts."
He kept his word. Thousands of suspects, military and civilian, were
put to death. The surviving leaders of the conspiracy were tortured in
prison to make them confess. Then they were given trials by the
so-called "People's Court" and sentenced to death. Execution in many
cases was carried out by slow strangulation while the victims were
suspended by piano wire from meathooks borrowed from butcher shops.
Field Marshal von Witzleben was thus strangled. Field Marshals von
Kluge and Rommel and General Beck managed to cheat Hitler of his cruel
revenge by killing themselves. Rommel, because of his past services to
the warlord, actually was offered by Hitler the choice of suicide or
trial for treason. He preferred killing himself to being hanged.
This did not prevent Hitler from publicly announcing that the popular
Rommel had died a "hero's death" as the result of his wounds in
Normandy. The warlord sent the widow a wire:
"Accept my sincerest sympathy for the heavy loss you have suffered with
the death of your husband."
Though he had escaped death by a miracle and had put down the generals'
plot with his customary energy and brutality, Adolf Hitler was never
the same after July 20, 1944. General Guderian, who now became Chief of
the Army General Staff, later recalled the change.
What had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became
plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that
others lied to him. He believed no one any more. It had already been
difficult enough dealing with him. It now became a torture that grew
steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control
and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he
found no restraining influence.
Nevertheless, it was this man alone, half-mad and rapidly crumbling in
body and mind, who now rallied the beaten, retreating German armies and
put new heart into the battered German nation, just as he had done in
the grim, snowy winter of 1941 before Moscow.
By an incredible exercise of will power which all the others in Germany
lacked—in the army, in the government and among the people—Adolf Hitler
was able almost single-handedly to prolong the agony of war for well
nigh a year.
